Sanity on the Weird Timeline

A friend and I were joking about Trump and I asked him, "Have you seen that Comey testimony?" And he thought I said "Kobe", and he was like, "Kobe testified against Trump?" I repeated myself more clearly, but we both agreed that really, that wouldn't be all that unexpected at this point. Anyway, this article is about how you stay sane in a world that gets weirder, faster than we can keep up by the illustrious Sonya Mann of Exolymph.

The ultimate tragedy of mankind is that we only want to change when the end is in sight--or hindsight. Even now, I have some money budgeted for disaster gear but part of me is like, "Nah, it's OK. I can figure that stuff out later," when the entire point of my disaster fund is so that I can buy (and have) things that will prepare me for a disaster. But it's so easy--everything is so normal. My job is right here. Yet, this hyperreality makes us feel more exposed, more utilitarian, more paralyzed, and it's comforting to fall back into routine, convenience, luxury (because if you're reading this newsletter, you have luxury), all the while there's this impending sense of vulnerability, of dread. The more information I pour onto the internet the more I realize what I would lose by pulling the plug. I have, as of this moment, exactly 1,956 notes in Evernote, years of life experiences in Facebook, photos and videos (both personal and whimsical) scattered across devices, and only a few important documents in one single, flimsy, plastic file container. I own no physical photo albums.

Meanwhile, this article talks about that sense of fragility, its paradoxical force as we affirm our invulnerability, and the idea's role in history.

So... they put a backpack on a dragonfly. The backpack has electronics, sensors, and a solar cell. So they can use dragonflies to track... stuff? I guess? I don't know, but it's cool. Short little video inside. It cracks me up that there's some guy commenting on the Vimeo video, "Progress can not be stopped." Progress of ... dragonfly-mounted drones? (I see the applications. I'm just being snarky.)

Researchers using CRISPR frequently analyze for side effects by targeting sections of the genome that have a high probability of unintentional mutations, but when they don't analyze the whole genome, they can be missing potentially important mutations. In mice, for example, they found "more than 100 large gene deletions or insertions". However, they couldn't find any side effects... yet. Boy, it'd suck to have your eye color changed in a routine aesthetic gene mod operation and then have a family, and a kid, and that kid is born with a tail. Who could have seen that coming?

Compromised sites prompt the user to download a very sounds-like-I-need-it "HTML5 Encoding 0.3.7" Firefox extension which then reports user information back to a command and control server. But wait! There's more! In order to resolve the C&C server domain, the malware checks out the comments section of a Britney Spears instagram photo and finds a comment which resolves to a certain hash value (a hash is an output created by an algorithm that can be applied to arbitrary bits of text - therefore, the malware "test" the comments by "hashing" all of them until it finds the one that matches). There's a more technical explanation here if you're interested in this sort of stuff. (Thanks, Damianne. ily)

C'mon, man. I'm pissed, too, but... I don't know. Part of me is annoyed at this guy, part of me sympathizes, part of me is grossed out, and part of me despairs at the facts of the situation in general.

Way's Notes

Hi!

Gee golly whiz I'm tired. Long day and many hours of improvisation. By which I mean improv comedy (and sometimes tragedy). You probably don't know this about me (unless we know each other), but I've been doing "improv" for about a year and it's had some amazing impact on my personal/emotional life. You might be interested in this article on how improv can act as a form of therapy.

Most compelling about improv to me is that it liberates you to laugh, act, and play pretend. Shamelessness, play, and acceptance are major themes. But beyond the stage, it works an emotional muscle that many of us have trained out of us by the time we're adults: to be playful, to have fun, to dare, to explore, to be foolish. As I've been digging into improv, as well as tweaking my own mental models, I'm realizing just how important and necessary it is to be able to stretch how you think about yourself. How to keep your attention and focus. How to care about someone else and trust them in the moment.

It's important now because when you're plugged in, The Stream keeps you from doing that. It demands your attention, in fits and bursts. It encourages you to laugh at other's stupidity and misfortune. It demands that you put your best out there, and that you keep doing it lest people turn away. It makes you want to optimize, to number crunch, to accumulate. Well, it does those things to me, at least.

What I'm trying to say is, if you feel yourself drifting away, lost in minutiae, numbers, ideas, self-concern, try to do something that makes you feel human again. Earthy, grounded, connected. Even if you're alone, solitary--there's comfort in birds, in grass, even in listening to cars drive over gravel, the urban ocean sounds of the street.

Don't get me wrong--I still want a badass robot arm. I just want it to be able to feel.

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